from the game-theory dept

We talk a great deal around these parts about new business models at both the macro and micro level. Individual experiments and successes, as well as failures, are both interesting and instructive, but a good macro-level look at how entire industries can function in a digital marketplace should be equally useful. With that in mind, Chris Dixon has an absolute must-read post on Medium on the lessons other industries can learn from the PC gaming industry's success in recent times.

It's worth noting before we start here that the past five years or so have been chock-full of hand-wringing over every potential danger to the PC gaming industry you could imagine, from casual mobile games to piracy. And, to some extent, I can understand that fear. After all, PC gaming has perhaps lower barriers to entry than other entertainment mediums, making competition more heavy, while the average consumer of PC games is likely going to be more familiar with the ways of piracy and the technical workarounds to DRM than the average music or movie consumer. Too bad for all that fear that, as Dixon's article notes, the PC gaming industry has enjoyed healthy growth over these past several years (something like 50% revenue growth since 2012). Much of that has to do with the innovative ways gaming companies have found to do business.

Even if you have no interest in video games, if you are interested in media, you should be interested in PC gaming. Over the past decade, PC gaming has, for a variety of reasons, become a hotbed of experimentation. These experiments have resulted in a new practices and business models — some of them surprising and counterintuitive — that provide valuable lessons for the rest of the media industry.

Those experiments will sound quite familiar to the Techdirt reader. They include free-to-play models, with game extras being sold to gamers. They also include the development of strong and convenient selling platforms, like Steam and GOG.com. The so-called "freemium" model is particularly well done in PC games, in part because many of those games respect gamers enough not to use the model to break the integrity of the game itself.

The PC gaming world has taken the freemium model to the extreme. In contrast to smartphone games like Candy Crush that are “free-to-play,” PC games like Dota 2 are “free-to-win.” You can’t spend money to get better at the game — that would be seen as corrupting the spirit of fair competition. (PC gamers, like South Park, generally view the smartphone gaming business model as cynical and manipulative). The things you can buy are mostly cosmetic, like new outfits for your characters or new background soundtracks. League of Legends (the most popular PC game not on Steam) is estimated to have made over $1B last year selling these kinds of cosmetic items.

Medium also goes on to point out PC gaming's latest foray into money-making in the form of live events. In what will sound familiar to anyone who has read our posts about the music industry, live gaming events are fantastic revenue generators, especially as they've become massively popular in the past few years.

Add to all of this the relatively permissive attitude in PC gaming circles that companies have towards mods of their games and you have a recipe for violent adoption and the willingness to buy by the gaming public. Mods make games more attractive to wider audiences, increasing purchases. Some mods indeed become their own games, increasing purchases. Most game companies encourage this modding culture, generating good-will within the consumer-base. No other industry does this as well.

Contrast this to the music industry, which relies on litigation to aggressively stifle remixing and experimentation. Large music labels have effectively become law firms devoted to protecting their back catalog. Sometimes this means suing their peers, and sometimes this means suing communities of users. The end result is a strong chilling effect on new experiments. Almost all new music-related tech products are minor variations of preceding products. It’s too risky and expensive to try something genuinely new.

And finally, there is the embrace of crowd-funding. Crowd-funding has been adopted in virtually all entertainment mediums, but I struggle to see any of them doing crowd-funding as well as the PC gaming industry. From experiments done by household PC gaming names like Tim Schafer, to diverse tiered-rewards for funding, to the willingness of some to forego offers from traditional game publishers to go the crowd-funding route, PC gaming is full of these success stories.

The point of all this is that new and innovative business models can work for other industries as well. There's nothing unique about the PC gaming industry that won't translate over to some degree for music, movies, television, etc. They just have to try.

from the amazingly-amazing dept

Content Creator of the Month is a new project from the Copia Institute that we'll also be highlighting here. Each month, we'll profile a new content creator who is doing interesting and compelling things, often using the internet in innovative and powerful ways. Here is the very first installment...

A few weeks ago, a couple of friends friends were tweeting about an incredible new YouTube video in which some people created a "real life first-person shooter" and hooked it up to Chatroulette, Skype and Omegle. Random people on the services were transported into this game, which they controlled with their voice. If you haven't watched it, find ten minutes to check it out (or just 5 if you speed up YouTube to 2x speed). It is incredibly detailed, and awesome beyond words:

My first reaction was to marvel at how much effort must have gone into setting all of this up. I had initially assumed the "game" couldn't go very far beyond the tiny room where it started — but it goes much, much further. My second thought was about how hard it must have been to coordinate all the sounds, effects and movements (even while recognizing that the final version is cut together from the takes that "worked"). Thankfully, the people behind it — Realm Pictures — also put together a behind the scenes video that reveals the inner workings (and doesn't make the original any less magical):

I started looking into the team, and realized I actually knew a bit about them, as this is hardly the first time that Realm Pictures has done cool stuff online. Years back, while based out of their home in Devon in the UK, these guys filmed their very own zombie flick called Zomblies, which they posted for free on YouTube. For a bunch of "amateurs" (at the time), the production value is amazing -- they even got someone to donate time in a helicopter, allowing them to film aerial shots. But there's another important piece of the story: while they were making the film, Realm Pictures was also using the internet to build up a community of people who were interested in the process, with their daily blog about the work acquiring a big following.

David Reynolds, the founder and creative director of Realm Pictures (and the voice in the first person shooter above), told me that "building a community has always been instrumental to both our process and our success with projects thus far." The community has followed them from project to project, such as the team's next giant undertaking The Underwater Realm, a series of five short films with large segments taking place underwater — an incredible challenge for any filmmaker, let alone relatively inexperienced independents. The team originally tried to use wires and a green screen, but realized it just wasn't realistic enough. Eventually someone donated a special casing for a camera, allowing them to actually film underwater (mostly in a local public swimming pool). Here's the first of those films (and they also have a behind the scenes video):

In order to make that movie, they also embraced another useful online tool, Kickstarter, to cover some of the production costs, eventually raising over $100,000 (they had sought $60,000). While Reynolds is supportive of crowdfunding, he does worry that it may be peaking, and that "the bubble is beginning to burst, as now it seems that everybody and his dog has a Kickstarter campaign."

One of the things that struck me personally about Realm Pictures is their ability to create visually amazing narrative film projects on relatively small budgets. For many years we've been debating the question of "the $200 million movie," in which traditional Hollywood studios keep asking how they can continue to make movies that require such huge budgets if people are unwilling to pay to watch them. And yet, as we've seen over and over again, technology and basic creativity are enabling the creation of incredible movies for a lot less. Much of Realm Pictures' work shows how that's possible. Still, Reynolds has talked in the past (notably in an interview with Kevin Smith) about being interested in doing a much bigger, Hollywood studio-funded version of Underwater Realm, which he estimates will cost somewhere in that $200 million range. So far, studios haven't been willing to pony up — but Reynolds insists there are lots of fun projects the company will be working on, even as they hope they'll one day be able to create that underwater epic.

Throughout these projects there's a strong thread: building a community and bringing it along for the ride. Reynolds tells me this is very important to how they've been able to succeed and, at the same time, give back to those who have supported them:

It is a practice we hope will always continue through our career, and at the same time give back to the community which has supported us by giving back in the form of a transparent insight into our work and things like the free tutorials we have released on our YouTube channel.

Reynolds points out that, in the end, none of this matters if the content isn't great, and that's always been the key: create great content for your community. Without that, the community won't last either. This is the combination that we've seen work for so many successful creators today. Creating great content is always at the core, and building up a loyal community around it helps spread that content and open new doors.

In terms of this latest video, which went viral super fast (I first saw it when it had about 3,000 views, but now it has over 7 million), Reynolds says it was just a fun project that they did in a weekend, with "one practice run, with a member of our team on a Skype call... to check that the system was working, and then straight into finding strangers on the internet." They ended up doing about 50 runs, with the few players who completed the whole "level" taking about 20 minutes. This is one of the first really "interactive" film experiences I've seen where the interactivity fits right in and doesn't feel forced (though of course now everyone is just watching instead of playing — but watching how others interact still feels kind of interactive). Reynolds points out that they're really just taking what makes video games so engaging, and moving it to video.

Oh, and Reynolds also notes that they're now working on level two of the game, so stay tuned (and maybe start using Chatroulette, if you want to play!)

You can read below for my whole interview with Dave Reynolds of Realm Pictures, our very first Content Creator of the Month.

from the +1-broad-sword-of-awesomeness dept

If you need an example of a game developer doing something (well, a lot of things) right, look no further than CD Projekt Red and their latest multi-platform role-playing game, Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. The developers are aggressively breaking all of the usual obnoxious video game industry norms: they're releasing most of the title's downloadable content (DLC) for free (two each week), they've avoided annoying pre-order exclusives, they're receptive to fan feedback, and perhaps most importantly to many gamers, they've taken a repeated, strong and vocal position against DRM.

"Sales of the third part will be many times higher than with our earlier games. Preorders indicate this," CD Projekt's chief executive Adam Kicinski said in an interview. "We broke into the mainstream. It is such a moment in our firm's history that after some years people will look differently at CD Projekt before and after this release." DM BO Brokerage analyst Tomasz Rodak said he saw the new Witcher's yearly sales at 7 million copies, which could bring a record net profit of 369 million zlotys ($97.5 million) in 2015.

And again, they've done it without resorting to the obnoxious, nickel and dime tactics so many game companies have an unholy addiction to.

It's also worth noting the game itself is really, really good. I was one of the few avid RPG fans that found the first two titles to enjoyable but relatively clunky affairs. I'm a sucker for open-world games however, and with the shift of the series to a truly open world, I've been absolutely blown away not only by the sheer size of the game world, but by how fleshed out the storytelling is for a lot of the side quests. It's a fully inhabitable fantasy-nerd paradise. While the writing still stumbles around the usual stale fantasy gender tropes (which scantily-clad sorceress shall I seduce next?), overall it's an incredible accomplishment.

The company's also showing it has a sense of humor. Long critical of DRM, CD Projekt Red's not only not using DRM for the title, it has found marginally-entertaining ways to mock DRM in game. From a grimoire on "Defensive Regulatory Magicon" found by one user while they were busy exploring:

The game does have an atrocious, headache-inducing font problem the company's planning to patch, so here's the text:

"The Defensive Regulatory Magicon (or DRM for short) belongs to the above-mentioned group of the longest-lasting, most effective and hardest to break defensive mechanisms. In order to recognize the individual administering it, it makes use of a portal mounted at the entrance of the area it is to defend. This portal passes streams of magical energy through the body of the person entering and can, in the blink of an eye, determine if this person has the corporeal signature (eyeball structure included) of the entitled administrator. As a result, the only unauthorized individuals that can possibly hope to enter are mimics.

DRM thus makes for an extremely effective and near-unbreakable security measure - but you are in luck, for you hold in your hands the key to bypassing it, namely the present tome, Gottfried’s Omni-opening Grimore, or GOG for short. In the pages to follow you will find innumerable methods for deactivating DRM, or, even better, bypassing it altogether (…)"

A Bill Hicks level joke it ain't (GOG is also short for DRM-free games outlet Good Old Games, run by CD Projekt), but the full quest is notably more amusing, with said "DRM" trapping the owner of the magic technology in a tower after failing to recognize him. Not only is CD Projekt Red doing everything right in regards to DLC and DRM, it's doing it with a little flair. Offer a great product, treat your customers well, don't obnoxiously nickel and dime people like it's going out of style, and customers respond positively. Who the hell knew?

from the seeeeee? dept

It's become commonplace in some parts of the legacy content industries to hate on basically any successful internet service that brings creative content to the public in a way that people actually like. We see attacks on Spotify, Netflix, Pandora and more for "not paying enough," and demands from those companies that they need to pay more. As we've noted, this often takes the form of trying to kill the golden goose. Almost always implicit in these discussions is the idea that the service itself is worthless and that all of the value comes from the content. That these services deserve to make any money at all is seen as some sort of insult to the copyright holders. The underlying belief here is that the service part is easy.

But, of course, that's wrong. Lots of services try and fail to capture the public's imagination. The content is important (and all of these services pay huge amounts of money -- often way more than half of their revenue to the copyright holders) but building a service people actually want to use is not an easy task. When those who think otherwise jump in and think they can simply "build their own" such service, you hope they would slowly start to understand this point.

You may recall that Jay-Z recently bought and relaunched a music streaming service, naming it Tidal. The whole rollout had severe issues, some of which Mike outlined in the post linked above (the lack of any free tier), and some issues I had myself that dovetail with Tidal's entire marketing platform. You see, Tidal's message was all about how artist-friendly it would be, working itself into a froth over being the anti-Pandora/Spotify/Whatever service, which were all demonized as not paying artists nearly enough money for their music. Which, fine, whatever, it's a message of a sort, I suppose. But to roll that message out with marketing ads featuring insanely wealthy musicians in designer clothes all getting together to talk about ushering in a new service designed to generate more money for themselves (and perhaps newer artists too)? Look, there's nothing wrong with being rich, but that's just bad PR.

Tidal is now the 50th most popular music app in the iTunes store, and doesn't even crack the top 700 overall. Any hot new app will see a big drop in downloads after the hype from its launch dies down, but it doesn't look like Tidal was all that hot to begin with. It briefly peaked at #19 overall before falling out of the top 200 less than two weeks later.

Meanwhile, its competitors are surging: Pandora is at #7, Spotify is at #34, and Beats Music just broke the top 50. Even circa-2013 Spotify challenger Rdio is seeing more downloads than Tidal this week.

Not a good showing, especially given all of the star-power behind it. But let's not treat this by dancing on any freshly dug graves. That would be premature anyway, since we are only talking about a couple of weeks worth of market time here. Regardless of that fact, what this should do is teach some artists an important lesson about the difficulty of providing a music streaming platform, the market forces that decided the winners and losers, and the value that a good streaming service brings both to customers and to artists alike.

The whole campaign against Pandora and Spotify has been insane since the very beginning. Streaming services that provide a useful way for customers and potential customers to find, listen to, and to become fans of artists and their work were demonized as greedy technocratic regimes designed solely to make sure singers didn't have enough bus-fare to get home at night. That was silly, of course, as one look at the amount of income those streaming services generate versus what artists wanted in terms of royalties, but the whole thing was really begging for a "If you think it's so easy, come up with your own service" rebuttal. Jay-Z tried to take this on. It's starting to look like he failed.

Failure is okay, but only if you learn from it. The very thing that Tidal failed to offer is what makes the other services so popular.

Some of Tidal’s problems were apparent to anyone who is not a wealthy member of the illuminati or close personal friend of Jay Z: its main value proposition was that, for only 10 dollars a month more than you’re paying for Spotify—that’s just two Starbucks lattes!—you can feed and clothe the famous multimillionaires you see on your screen. But it also had some less obvious flaws, like a very shittily-designed app with broken search functionality and a marketing message—attacking those other, non-artist-benefitting streaming services—that seems to have helped Spotify more than it helped Tidal.

Combined with no free tier, the single selling point for Tidal appeared to be appealing to the masses to use a service that pays artists more money than the others. It didn't work. Not because people do not want artists to succeed, but because the other services work better than Tidal and the artists pimping Tidal did nothing to connect with customers. It was a plea, entirely one-sided, with nothing additional offered to the customer. That's the lesson: streaming services aren't as easy to do as these artists thought. Now let's see if they do anything with that lesson.

from the bizzaro-nintendo dept

Peruse the history of fan-film posts we've done in the past and you'll be met with depressing results. Too often the makers of movies and video games prefer a restrictive approach to fans using any form of their content. The approach tends to be of the blanket variety, where a default to protectionism often ties up fan-work that is either usefully creative in and of itself, or else beneficial to the original content producers if only it would be allowed to breathe. Nintendo has become famous for this kind of restrictive practice in YouTube recently, but it is hardly alone.

Rockstar, as it has so often before, breaks the mold on this kind of thing. Back when Grand Theft Auto 4 was the latest iteration in the GTA series, some enterprising fans had used video editing equipment, along with the game itself, to create their own brand of fan-film, using game footage as the vehicle for an admittedly simple but impressive story line. The whole thing was 2 hours long and has been viewed on YouTube over half a million times. Rockstar, for its part, not only didn't take the video down, but it went so far as to provide its own video editing software for fans in the latest PC version of the series, Grand Theft Auto 5.

When Grand Theft Auto V launches tomorrow, it will come complete with a video editing suite that will allow you to make movies from Story Mode and GTA Online footage you capture. The software, the Rockstar Editor, lets you do a number of things [like] record and edit footage and share them with the community. The editor features special camera modes, filters, depth of field and audio customization options, and a Director Mode feature that allows you to create movie-making sequences from a cast of characters from Story Mode.

This, quite simply, is how it's done. Rockstar/GTA fans expressed an interest organically in something they wanted to do with Rockstar's product, an emergent use that Rockstar may never have even considered, and, rather than getting butthurt over the use of the content and sending out the threat-letters, the company enabled its fans' behavior instead.

And why wouldn't they? After all, far from harm, it would be an absolute boon to Rockstar to see YouTube pages filled with fan-creations in the form of short or monstrously-long creative works, all done within GTA itself. It's just one more way to have fun within the game, one more way to be expressive with fellow fans of the game, and one more way for the GTA name to be etched into gaming history. This is pure CwF+RtB calculus at its finest.

from the gifted-awesomeness dept

Joss Whedon has long held a special place in the hearts of geeks. And not only for producing some real cultural gifts, such as Firefly and the Avengers movies. On top of those achievements, he's also been fairly proactive when it comes to embracing digital business models and treating fans with an unmatched level of awesomeness.

Most filmmakers are grateful for the support of their audience, but for the past few weeks, Joss Whedon has really been demonstrating his gratitude. Last month, Whedon announced at the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of In Your Eyes — the supernatural romance starring Zoe Kazan and Michael Stahl-David and directed by Brin Hill (Ball Don’t Lie), which Whedon wrote and executive produced — that fans could watch the film immediately by renting it for $5 through Vimeo. Since then, Whedon’s filmmaking team has been secretly sending thank-you gifts to a random selection of fans who have streamed the movie.

Those gifts have ranged from planted cacti to cooking grills all the way up to Apple TVs and Xbox Ones. Those thank you gifts were also distributed not only in the United States, but as far away as the UK, Germany, New Zealand and Dubai. How do we know about all this? Was it because Whedon and his team went out of their way to operate this system as some kind of bribery contest to get people to watch the film? No. Instead, we're learning about it because recipients of the thank you gifts are going out of their way to thank Whedon and sharing the acts of awesomeness on social media.

@adriaanbloem: Rented #inyoureyes on Vimeo, and they then sent a "small token of appreciation": an Apple TV! Smart marketing because yes, I'm tweeting this

It's a hell of a promotional tool, to have some of your biggest fans get the word out both about your movie and the kind of behavior that can't help but breed goodwill and positive marketing. In other words, like anything else, this isn't so much altruism as combined marketing efforts between a producer and fans that results from being awesome. By gifting a small and somewhat random number of viewers of a small film, suddenly you have a flurry of attention being paid where otherwise there might be little.

“The idea was we’re doing something a little different, and we just want to say thank you,” said Roiff. “Someone said on social media, like, ‘Oh, it’s almost like they got Kickstarter backwards and they’re doing it in reverse.’ That is sort of what we’re doing, saying, you know what, this is working out, and we want to say thanks and give something back, and try to keep people talking so we can keep doing it this way.”

It's working and it's a lesson to other creators and artists about how much benefit can be garnered simply by treating their fans well.

from the the-finer-things dept

In the realm of both embracing new business models in video games and generally being an all around awesome company, it doesn't get a whole lot better than Double Fine. If we were to write a playbook for a gaming company, it would probably read like Double Fine's history, from producing enormously entertaining games, to embracing crowd-funding models, to treating their fans in a manner too rare in their industry.

Perhaps Bad Golf 2 will prove to be the One Direction of Double Fine's latest Amnesia Fortnight prototype-off. Not selected as a winning project in the X-Factorish voting, it seemed destined to never become a reality – until fans decided to make it anyway. And now it's generating more headlines than any of the "official" picks did.

That's because fourteen fans of Double Fine are collaborating on the company's own website to produce this game themselves. So, instead of the game never being produced, it will be realized by dedicated and passionate fans. While many companies might go berserk over this, Double Fine is not your average company. From the top down, everyone seems thrilled.

BG2 ideasmith Patrick Hackett, a ‘tech guru’ at Double Fine, told Eurogamer that “Personally, I was flattered by the idea that people would want to collaborate to make a game idea of mine. I really couldn’t have been more excited to hear about this idea and told them I’d support them as much as I could.”

“As for it being Double Fine’s property – Greg and I brought the situation up to Tim and Justin and they approved of the idea, citing that any production should remain in the creative commons. Because of that, the project’s source control repository is available for free and the final product will never be sold.”

This very specifically bucks every rebuttal typically offered by those that advocate for strong and stronger protection of intellectual property. Somehow, a company is giving free access to their own source code for a game based on IP the company developed, and is happy about doing so, while fans of the company are creating the game under the full knowledge that there won't be any monetary compensation. How could any of that be possible if we relied on the words of Electronic Arts and their ilk?

The answer is that creation and collaboration are a natural part of the human psyche, and they're spurred on when the collaborating parties all treat one another like human beings. Meanwhile, Double Fine is already taking an interest in the project's success as an avenue to then release their own Bad Golf 3 game, should the project pan out. Everyone wins, all because nobody brought the legal hammer down to protect their intellectual property and managed to treat their fans like human beings.

from the how-not-to-do-it dept

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a rather encouraging development in filmmaking, highlighting the story of Warner Bros. film studio working out a deal with the producer and actors of the popular Veronica Mars TV show, that if they could prove demand for a film via Kickstarter, Warner Bros. would fund the rest of the film. Basically, Warner Bros. had been unconvinced that there was enough demand for a movie to finance it upfront. But, with tools like Kickstarter today, you can prove demand upfront, taking away a big part of the risk. And that's exactly what happened, as the project raised over the $2 million target very quickly, and eventually brought in $5.7 million. Part of what was interesting about this was it showed how movie studios could actually embrace crowdfunding as well, creating some interesting hybrid models that don't always involve some studio head deciding what people will and won't like.

The movie came out last week to very good reviews... but leave it to Warner Bros. to totally muck it up, screw over the goodwill from all those backers and scare people off from such future collaborations. That's because one of the popular tiers promised supporters that they would get a digital download of the movie within days of it opening. But, of course, this is a major Hollywood studio, and due to their irrational fear of (oh noes!) "piracy" they had to lock things down completely. That means that backers were shunted off to a crappy and inconvenient service owned by Warner Bros called Flixster, which very few people use, and then forced to use Hollywood's super hyped up but dreadful DRM known as UltraViolet.

“My first and last time using Flixster or Ultraviolet,” Jennifer Gottried wrote. “Not happy about what a pain the digital “download” is, but loved the movie!” Carolyn O'Neill said she felt “ripped off,” adding “I will not be supporting anything VMars related in the future, and may never support a similar Kickstarter project again.”

Others labeled Flixster “unreliable,” “crap,” “slow” and “punishing.” There are those who downloaded the movie without a hiccup, and those who did have been effusive in their praise. Yet the majority expressed dismay....

Reading through the comments shows an awful lot of angry folks, with lots of blame being directed at Flixster, and some people angry that the creator of Veronica Mars, Rob Thomas, let this happen. He eventually posted that while he had "hoped" that Warner Bros. would allow more options, "unfortunately, it just wasn't possible. In the end, Flixster was the best option for getting the digital movie reward out to all of you, worldwide, at the same time." There may be something to do with regional restrictions, yet in the comments, you see people claim that when they tried to get their digital copy, they were told, "Sorry, the redemption code you have entered is not valid for the territory you are currently trying to redeem from." So, it's not clear how Flixster actually solves that global issue. Multiple people in the comments note that they eventually just gave up getting the authorized version and hit up unauthorized sources instead.

Eventually, Warner Bros. announced that it would provide refunds to backers who had trouble getting the digital download, which seems like the least it could do, given the situation. But, the end result appears to have left a sour taste in a lot of peoples' mouths. So, way to go, legacy Hollywood, for taking an exciting success story of internet-empowered opportunity, and destroying it with crappy and lame proprietary platforms and restrictive DRM. Once again, you show how to screw up just about every opportunity handed to you.

from the good-decision dept

If all you knew about David Braben was what you found via a search on Techdirt, you might think he's someone unprepared for the future of his craft. There's only one article, featuring him many years back in a story in which he appeared to be very angry about the way retailers promoted used-games sales instead of pimping new games. But, as most truly hardcore gamers will know, Braben is so much more than that. Sometimes called "The Godfather of Gaming", Braben was one of the chief creators of Elite, the breakthrough game produced in the 80's that was both wildly successful and still serves as the unacknowledged inspiration behind many present titles.

And now he appears to be recognizing the importance of new business models, while also realizing that piracy isn't the all-out evil many claim. In a fascinating interview with The Telegraph, Braben spoke about Frontier: First Encounters, the latest iteration in the Elite series, which Braben's company funded through Kickstarter.

The project was launched on US crowdfunding site Kickstarter in November 2012 and aimed to raise £1.25m. “Take a ship and 100 credits to make money legally or illegally - trade, bounty-hunt, pirate, assassinate your way across the galaxy,” read the pitch. The project smashed its funding target, raising over £1.5m, and the subsequent media furore saw a further £700,000 (and rising) added to the pot by eager investors. It is the most successful British game ever to raise funds on Kickstarter.

While I wouldn't dream of losing sight of what a sign of the times it is that a legend like Braben is turning to new business models for his company, allow me to highlight the importance of that last bit about investors. As I've suggested in the past, embracing platforms like Kickstarter is wonderful, but it doesn't have to be the first and only step. Building up interest through Kickstarter is also a wonderful way to prove the marketability of a product to investors, whose money and backing can then be used to build up a blockbuster-style budget. This is the answer to the question of, "How is Kickstarter going to fund the next AAA game, or international record release, or $200 million movie?" It isn't, in and of itself, but it can be a demonstrative step one in the process, far more open to the general population than the antiquated process of submitting ideas to traditional gatekeepers.

While that would be enough for a hearty "Huzzah!", no interview with a video game producer would be complete without questions about piracy. Here, too, Braben finds himself looking on the bright side.

“Piracy, while frustrating, can contribute to game evangelism,” he said. “It can also help you reach new territories. For example, we are huge in China now. In the old days of silver discs, it would have been impossible to break the whole country. We would have needed an office in every province but through piracy, our games are circulating and fans are now seeking us out.

“Piracy goes hand in hand with sales,” he continued. “If a game is pirated a lot it will be bought a lot. People want a connected experience, so with pirated games we still have a route in to get them to upgrade to real version. And even if someone’s version is pirated, they might evangelise and their mates will buy the real thing.”

This is the kind of thinking that can create massively wealthy businesses. He acknowledges that, from his perspective, piracy of his games is irritating. I can understand that. Who couldn't? But his ability to put that into its proper perspective while also strategizing a way to turn pirates into customers is a beautiful thing. For it to come from the Godfather of Gaming only makes this more important. It'd be like the largest record labels flipping their script completely and attempting life in the new world for once.

The game, as noted, is already funded, so we're getting it. Here's hoping it proves to be an even bigger success than it is already so it can serve as a beacon to other creators.

from the good-for-them dept

From pretty much the beginning of this blog, we've been talking about how artists who embrace what new technologies allow seem to see much better results than trying to resist the future. Last year, we discussed examples of how both Moby and Tim Ferriss were embracing BitTorrent and its "bundles" offering to amazing results. BitTorrent has now published some data on the amazing ability of a variety of artists to use BitTorrent Bundles to drive tremendous attention and revenue their way.

Moby, for example, got an astounding 8.9 million downloads of his offering -- with 419,000 of them agreeing to join his mailing list and 130,000 of them going over to iTunes to the album (many of which likely resulted in sales). And, of course, the thing Moby himself said he was most excited about was the ability of fans to remix and reimagine his works. So it's another bit of good news to see that 68,000 remixes were created. As for Ferriss, his bundle of additional material that went with his book turned into an amazing promotion. His book was published by Amazon, but banned by Barnes and Noble (because, apparently, Barnes and Noble is petty). The material got 2 million downloads, leading an astounding 880,000 of those people to go check out the book on Amazon... where the book became a best seller.

The link above provides a number of other case studies about ways in which a variety of artists are learning to use BitTorrent and BitTorrent Bundles to help gain widespread attention, and then are able to turn that attention into fans and revenue. And this is a program that only recently started, so we're excited to see where it continues to go in the future.